One day in 1965, while driving to Acapulco
for a vacation with his family, Colombian journalist Gabriel García
Márquez abruptly turned his car around, asked his wife to take care of the
family’s finances for the coming months, and returned home. The beginning of a new book
had suddenly come to him: “Many years later,
as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember
that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Over the next eighteen months, those words would blossom
into One Hundred Years of Solitude. A novel that would go on
to bring Latin American literature to the forefront
of the global imagination, earning García Márquez
the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. What makes One Hundred Years of Solitude
so remarkable? The novel chronicles the fortunes
and misfortunes of the Buendía family
over seven generations. With its lush, detailed sentences, large cast of characters, and tangled narrative, One Hundred Years of Solitude
is not an easy book to read. But it’s a deeply rewarding one, with an epic assortment
of intense romances, civil war, political intrigue, globe-trotting adventurers, and more characters
named Aureliano than you’d think possible. Yet this is no mere historical drama. One Hundred Years of Solitude
is one of the most famous examples of a literary genre
known as magical realism. Here, supernatural events or abilities are described in a realistic
and matter-of-fact tone, while the real events of human life
and history reveal themselves
to be full of fantastical absurdity. Surreal phenomena within the
fictional village of Macondo intertwine seamlessly with events taking
place in the real country of Colombia. The settlement begins
in a mythical state of isolation, but is gradually exposed
to the outside world, facing multiple calamities along the way. As years pass,
characters grow old and die, only to return as ghosts, or to be seemingly reincarnated
in the next generation. When the American fruit company
comes to town, so does a romantic mechanic who is
always followed by yellow butterflies. A young woman up and floats away. Although the novel moves forward
through subsequent generations, time moves in an almost cyclical manner. Many characters have similar names
and features to their forebears, whose mistakes they often repeat. Strange prophecies
and visits from mysterious gypsies give way to the skirmishes
and firing squads of repeated civil wars. An American fruit company opens
a plantation near the village and ends up massacring thousands
of striking workers, mirroring the real-life
‘Banana Massacre’ of 1928. Combined with the novel’s magical realism, this produces a sense
of history as a downward spiral the characters seem powerless to escape. Beneath the magic is a story
about the pattern of Colombian and Latin American history
from colonial times onward. This is a history that
the author experienced firsthand. Gabriel García Márquez grew up
in a Colombia torn apart by civil conflict between its Conservative
and Liberal political parties. He also lived in an autocratic Mexico and covered the 1958 Venezuelan
coup d’état as a journalist. But perhaps his biggest influences
were his maternal grandparents. Nicolás Ricardo Márquez was a
decorated veteran of the Thousand Days War whose accounts of the rebellion against
Colombia's conservative government led Gabriel García Márquez
to a socialist outlook. Meanwhile, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes’
omnipresent superstition became the foundation
of One Hundred Years of Solitude’s style. Their small house in Aracataca
where the author spent his childhood formed the main inspiration for Macondo. With One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
found a unique way to capture the unique history
of Latin America. He was able to depict the strange reality
of living in a post-colonial society, forced to relive
the tragedies of the past. In spite of all this fatalism,
the novel still holds hope. At his Nobel Lecture, García Marquez reflected
on Latin America’s long history of civil strife and rampant iniquity. Yet he ended the speech by affirming the
possibility of building a better world, to quote, “where no one will be able
to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned
to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever,
a second chance on earth."
Gorillaz are pretty popular,but other than Feel Good Inc. it's not really my thing.
Fighting games. I pretty much enjoy everything about them, but never really played too much of them. This, in turn, resulted in me having a miserable time every time I try to play any fighting game because I suck, and I don't have time to put into them so I can reasonably good.
Read the first hundred pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude and it is interesting but also clearly beyond me.
Doom, JoJo, fighting games
Sekiro.
You can tell me how good it is, try to hype it to me until my ears fall off, but No, thank you. It's just not my game.
I am not the audience for Souls games. I have tried and bounced off Dark Souls several times and the general loop is not satisfying to me in the way it is for other people
unless you turn it into a 2D Metroidvania and put a bunch of bugs into it then I fucking love it, but I recognize that therr are aspects that people can get out of and enjoy from it.Ion Fury. The amount of polish and craft needed to make that game in the goddamn build engine is phenomenal. And it's fast paced and levels are good. But for whatever reason I found it kinda boring. I found it less fun than the games it was taking homage from (those being Duke 3D, Shadow Warrior, and Blood).
Akira, the animation’s really pretty but it feels like the plot’s spread too thin and I don’t really give much of a shit about most of the characters.
Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption, Ghosts of Tsushima, the list goes on. I can't deal with open world games, I get horrible choice paralysis and that kills any motivation or fun I had with the gameplay.
Edit: For a more specific answer, Chris Avellone's writing. His style is just too dense for me. I played a bit of Pillars of Eternity and always put off talking to Durance because I knew I'd have to set aside, like, ten or fifteen minutes to digest all of his shit.